How Not to Write Comics: Creating Comic Strips for the International Affairs Journal

This summer I got the opportunity to script the six comic strips that Sequential Potential created in collaboration with the International Affairs Journal at Oxford. The assignment was to write one-to-two panels of humorous dialogue based on six articles that would appear in their special issue, The How Not to Guide on Foreign Policy. Six-to-twelve panels; twenty five-to-thirty lines of dialogue. Simple assignment, right? Wrong.

While this was the shortest script assignment I’ve ever had as a comic script writer, it was far from the easiest. Taking twenty pages of excellent, but dense scholarship on foreign policy, and pulling out the core idea, then wrapping that idea in a comic strip joke, turned out to be quite the challenge. Then I had to repeat the process five more times. This was a process in writing comics that I hadn’t practiced before, and it turned out to be one of the most enjoyable writing experiences of my career. Early on in my comic writing days I was constantly advised that writing dialogue was often about editing away the fluff from a conversation. Writing these strips for the IA Journal gave me the opportunity to really put that into practice to the fullest degree, as the information in the dialogue had to be succinct in communicating the main thesis of the article. I was certainly not perfect in this task, but thankfully Isabel Muttreja and Krisztina Csortea from the IA Journal offered helpful feedback to make sure I was accurately representing the thesis of each article and using proper terminology.

Overall, writing for the IA Journal was an excellent experience, and I even learned a great deal about Foreign Policy in the process. Be sure to check out the IA Journal’s How Not to Guide on Foreign Policy. Also, you can read all six comic strips in our gallery.